British Artist Danny Fox Is On Fire (But Good Luck Getting One of His Paintings)

It’s midday in June, and I’m sitting in a cavernous studio on Los Angeles Street in downtown L.A. To get to the front door, one must navigate a gauntlet of cluttered storefronts pimping chintzy goods—fidget spinners are the current hot item—as well as a seething homeless population being squeezed by rapid gentrification. Harrowing though it may be, this spot is proving to be a strange sort of paradise for the 31-year-old British artist Danny Fox.

Since his arrival on New Year’s Day 2016, Fox has mounted no less than four solo shows around the globe. His jagged and oddly elegant canvases draw upon the bone-scraping squalor that surrounds his Skid Row digs, and most afternoons the artist can be found in the hoary local dive bars, drinking beer and sketching on paper napkins. Add to that his new proximity to kindred painter souls Wes Lang and Henry Taylor and one begins to get a sense of what’s fueling Fox’s recent output.

As he was growing up in St. Ives, a working-class town in the British countryside that once doubled as a bohemian enclave to Brit painters like Ben Nicholson and Alfred Wallis, Fox was driven by the urge to avoid a life spent washing dishes. So he decided to try his hand at art instead, which, due to his hometown’s oddly bifurcated DNA, seemed the other viable way to go. Leaving home in his teens, Fox eventually landed in London, where an endless string of shitty jobs offset his pub and paint tabs. A couple of chance encounters with the artist Sue Webster—Fox invited her to see his band and she didn’t show, but a year later she accepted an invitation to make a studio visit—led to Fox taking over Webster and Tim Noble’s Shoreditch studio. Fox says it was his breakthrough moment. “I’d painted enough to reach the point where I was like, ‘Fuck it,’ to painting well,” he says. “I just started letting the pieces be whatever they were.”

For example: After many years spent painting women, Fox found himself executing the figure of a horse on a canvas. Stepping back to take in the image, he muttered, “Surely not,” then left the studio. Returning later, he found his then-girlfriend, the tattoo artist Tati Compton, standing in front of the piece, nearly in tears. “I realized in that moment,” says Fox, “that sometimes a completely wrong-seeming thing can be more vital.” These days, the artist bats away requests from dealers and collectors for more horse paintings.

In fact, it can be tough for anyone to get hold of one of Danny's paintings, no matter the subject. Eager collectors are lucky if his shows aren't already sold out before they even open.

What makes Fox's work so electric is that, at first glance, much of it can appear almost traditional—a landscape or a portrait. But further inspection reveals an exploded quality to the compositions. There are often central figures, like blurry-eyed boxers, frayed bons vivants, and faded beauties, who anchor an undulating set of secondary images drawn from Fox’s unique iconography: flowers, palm fronds, rotting fruit, beer cans, and disembodied eyes. The works are moody, always indicating a hard-bitten existence, with nods in style and philosophy to Gauguin’s Tahiti and Bukowski’s East Hollywood. “I try to make one good painting at a time, but oftentimes a single canvas hosts many, many abandoned attempts,” Fox says. “The drive to not repeat yourself gets tougher and tougher as you progress.”

This fall, Fox will be included in the Saatchi Gallery’s group show in London called Iconoclasts: Art Out of the Mainstream. “Danny was quite the discovery,” says the show’s curator, Philly Adams. “There was an immediacy in how I connected to his work. So ambitious and challenging in scale and color, with a playful mix of historical and contemporary subjects. His paintings have that naive quality, but a confidence that you don’t want to fuck with.”

“It’s a very strange thing,” Fox says of his inclusion in the show. “I can remember, like, four years ago, standing in Saatchi and I just couldn’t see a way in. Sometimes in life, you dig so deep inside that you can’t imagine getting past where you are in that moment.” It might not be the most comfortable mind-set for plotting one’s career trajectory, but for Fox, it’s a crucial true north from which to paint.

This story was updated on 11/13/2018 to reflect the current relationship of Danny Fox and Tati Compton.